"Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants"

Both Elf Sternberg and Lori Selke point us to Unhappy Meals, written for this week's New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan begins his essay on nutrients, nutritionism, and healthy eating in true journalistic pyramid form:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. ...

Once he gets going, Pollan takes off from the evolving, contradictory claims of medical science about what we should be eating and why and unfolds them into an indictment of what he calls "nutritionism" — not a science, but an ideology about healthy eating. The key premise of of nutritionism is that the key to understanding food is the nutrient. Since nutrients, Pollan writes, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

I'm not doing the essay justice. Read the whole thing.